Building Productive eHealth Interventions for Underserved Groups: 5 Classes From a Ten years of eHealth Intervention Layout and Deployment

J Med Web Res. 2022 Jan 724(1):e25419. doi: 10.2196/25419.

Summary

Even with the proliferation of eHealth interventions, this kind of as world-wide-web portals, for overall health information and facts dissemination or the use of cellular apps and wearables for overall health monitoring, investigate has demonstrated that underserved groups do not profit proportionately from these eHealth interventions. This is mostly for the reason that of usability concerns and the deficiency of interest to the broader structural, actual physical, and psychosocial barriers to know-how adoption and use. The goal of this paper is to draw lessons from a ten years of knowledge in building distinct consumer-centered eHealth interventions (eg, web portals and health apps) to tell long term do the job in leveraging technological innovation to deal with wellness disparities. We draw these classes from a collection of interventions from the operate we have accomplished about 15 decades in the Viswanath laboratory at the Dana-Farber Most cancers Institute and Harvard TH Chan University of Community Overall health, focusing on three jobs that employed website portals and health and fitness applications qualified toward underserved teams. The jobs ended up the adhering to: Click to Hook up, which was a community-primarily based eHealth intervention that aimed to make improvements to web abilities and wellness literacy between underserved groups by offering dwelling accessibility to significant-speed internet, personal computer, and web teaching courses, as perfectly as a focused wellbeing world-wide-web portal with ongoing specialized aid World MassCONECT, which was a awareness translation undertaking that crafted potential among the group-based mostly organizations in Boston, Lawrence, and Worcester in Massachusetts to adopt evidence-centered well being advertising plans and Smartphone App for Community Well being, which was a mobile wellness investigate that facilitated equally participatory (eg, surveys) and passive information (eg, geolocations and website-browsing behaviors) selection for the reason of being familiar with tobacco information publicity in individuals’ constructed surroundings. Through our perform, we distilled five essential concepts for scientists aiming to style eHealth interventions for underserved groups. They are as follows: create a strategic road map to deal with conversation inequalities (ie, a concrete action approach to recognize the boundaries confronted by underserved groups and personalize certain solutions to just about every of them), engage various stakeholders from the starting for the extensive haul, design with usability-readability and navigability-in brain, make privacy safeguards into eHealth interventions and communicate privacy-utility tradeoffs in simplicity, and try for an ideal harmony between open science aspirations and defense of underserved groups.

PMID:34994700 | DOI:10.2196/25419